Starmer's shameless Mandelson "defence"

He must think we are all stupid

Keir Starmer thinks you’re stupid.

This is the only logical explanation you can deduce from his non-apology over Peter Mandelson. He has apologised, but on the basis that he was lied to - which in practise simply means “I haven’t done anything wrong”.

He said about the scandal over Mandelson’s appointment as US Ambassador:

It had been publicly known for some time that Mandelson knew Epstein, but none of us knew the depth or the darkness of that relationship. Information that was not known at the time of his appointment.

And he said about Mandelson’s self-described relationship with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein:

He portrayed Epstein as someone he barely knew, and when it became clear that it was not true, I sacked him.

And he also said:

I had no reason to believe he was telling anything other than the truth.

Except a 2019 internal report on Epstein published by JP Morgan - which came into the public domain in 2023 - concluded that Epstein appeared to “maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government.”

It also included email correspondence showing that Peter Mandelson stayed at one of his properties, as well as correspondence about business relations.

You can find this out after about 2 minutes of googling? So I’d imagine the British government and its intelligence services knew this as a bare minimum?

This comes back to this basic point. Starmer has long been presented as a man of integrity and honour, a dutiful public servant.

This was always total nonsense and should have been completely obvious to everyone. Why wasn’t it? Because Starmer’s dishonesty and lack of integrity were proven by his 2020 Labour leadership election, when he positioned himself as being on the left in order to con the membership into voting for him - and then not only junked those policies, but launched the most aggressive onslaught against the Labour left in history.

Mainstream political commentators didn’t object to that - they admired it, because they hate the left and regard dishonest tactics to crush them as ‘good politics’.

And who ran his Labour leadership campaign? Morgan McSweeney, now his chief of staff - who is Peter Mandelson’s protege.

Indeed Mandelson has self-evidently been dominating the Starmer project through McSweeney, who in turn treats Starmer as his frontman. That includes, we now learn, helping to direct Starmer’s Cabinet reshuffle - and alleged involvement in parliamentary selections.

Starmer has repeatedly proven his dishonesty - like when he defended Israel’s right to impose a siege on the Palestinian people, for example.

And as for his lack of integrity - note how he has taken more freebies than all Labour leaders since 1997 - including Tony Blair - put together.

When he entered Downing Street, this man of “integrity” decided to confiscate pensioners’ winter fuel payment and attack disability benefits, to introduce one of Europe’s strictest asylum systems (while raiding the rhetoric of Enoch Powell), suck up to Donald Trump and arrest elderly people for holding placards opposing genocide.

Starmer’s USP was supposed to be “competence” - and yet his administration has been defined by U-turns - itself symptomatic of its lack of direction. The Mandelson saga further underlines what a joke that claim was.

There is nothing to commend Starmer’s so-called leadership for. That he has been indulged for so long is a testament to the fact that he was seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’ from the point of view of the British Establishment, in that he had neutralised Labour as a party prepared to challenge wealth and power. He had done his job in that regard - and that’s all that mattered.